Arts & Culture

Teri Agins, veteran fashion columnist for The Wall Street Journal and author of two books about the business of fashion, said this in 1999 after Giorgio Armani produced the first collection of men’s suits without lining to make them more comfortable.

In October, roughly 16 years later, Agins, The Wall Street Journal’s first fashion reporter, published her latest book, “Hijacking the Runway: How Celebrities Are Stealing the Spotlight from Fashion Designers” (Penguin Random House, $28). In it she explains how celebrities have simultaneously revolutionized and marginalized the art of style.

Ever since Arin Mulvaney first performed Shakespeare with a high school troupe for elementary and middle school students, her dream has been to bring her beloved Bard and his work to younger children.

Today, she is the Artistic Director of Shakespeare All-Stars, a group of professional actors who travel around Chicago schools to present Shakespearean plays or scenes to a captive audience of students. They give about 15-18 performances a year.

“A lot of kids don’t have any experience with Shakespeare before high school,” Mulvaney said. “So for some people, especially elementary schoolers, they’ve never heard of this guy Shakespeare.”

When Ethel Payne was a student at Lindblom High School in West Englewood nearly a century ago, she published exactly one article for her school’s newspaper. But, according to biographer James McGrath Morris, Payne was never allowed on the newspaper’s staff.

As a black student during a time when Chicago was deeply segregated, Payne was prohibited from regularly writing articles for the student newspaper. Years later, Payne would become a pioneering journalist of the civil rights era. She reported for the Chicago Defender and earned a title as the “First Lady of the Black Press.”

Thursday evening, her alma mater, Lindblom Math and Science Academy, will dedicate its new journalism classroom to Payne, who attended the school from 1926 to 1930. The dedication is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. at Lindblom’s Keeler Hall, located at 6130 S. Wolcott Ave., followed by James McGrath Morris’ reading from his new biography about Payne at 6 p.m. Continue reading →

U.S. District Judge John W. Darrah Thursday morning denied a motion by the city of Chicago and the Chicago Park District to dismiss a lawsuit against a proposal to locate the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art on Chicago’s Museum Campus.

“We felt that in the state court system, it might be less likely that the case would be determined because of the legal aspects.”

– Cassandra Frances, Friends of the Parks

“While we are disappointed that the court did not resolve the case today, we look forward to the next phase of the public process to determine the best way to make the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art a great new addition to Chicago’s Museum Campus,” the city of Chicago’s Law Department said in a statement.

If you walked by room 613 at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago’s Flaxman Library on Saturday, you heard the sounds of furious typing and laughter as a diverse group of students and Chicago residents discussed feminism and the internet. Continue reading →

Chicago Slam Works House Ensemble brings the nooks and crannies of Chicago to light through literary theater. “Redlined: A Chicago Lyric” uses poetry and movement to paint brutally honest portraits of why many have a love/hate relationship with the city. Directed by J.W. Basilio, the cast of J. Evelyn, Rashaad Hall, Shelley Elaine Geiszler, Frankiem Mitchell, Dru Smith and Teagan Walsh-Davis put faces to the names of what makes up the city through the CTA Red Line and the characters that ride it.

The Islamic State, or ISIS, is using everything from sledgehammers to bulldozers to rewrite Iraq’s cultural history, a priceless legacy of art and archaeology that they consider inappropriate according to their interpretation of the Quran.

A recent video released by ISIS showcases their destruction of historical objects in Mosul’s museum, some dating back to as early as the 7th century B.C. According to Iraq’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, ISIS bulldozed the ancient site of Nimrud, a capital of the Assyrian Empire in the 800s B.C.

“Upper Michigan [Avenue] will be properly designed for magnificence, dignity and character, and will be like no other
commercial thoroughfare in the world.”

– Chicago real estate developer Arthur Rubloff, 1947

Imagine a time in Chicago when North Michigan Avenue, now unofficially known as the Magnificent Mile, wasn’t lined with vertical shopping malls and skyscrapers. Imagine a time, instead, when Michigan Avenue between Ontario and Oak streets was just an understated thoroughfare, linking Chicago’s bustling downtown centered at State and Madison to the residential Near North Side.